Abstract

Background

De novo eukaryotic promoter prediction is important for discovering novel genes and
understanding gene regulation. In spite of the great advances made in the past decade,
recent studies revealed that the overall performances of the current promoter prediction
programs (PPPs) are still poor, and predictions made by individual PPPs do not overlap
each other. Furthermore, most PPPs are trained and tested on the most-upstream promoters;
their performances on alternative promoters have not been assessed.

Results

In this paper, we evaluate the performances of current major promoter prediction programs
(i.e., PSPA, FirstEF, McPromoter, DragonGSF, DragonPF, and FProm) using 42,536 distinct
human gene promoters on a genome-wide scale, and with emphasis on alternative promoters.
We describe an artificial neural network (ANN) based meta-predictor program that integrates
predictions from the current PPPs and the predicted promoters' relation to CpG islands.
Our specific analysis of recently discovered alternative promoters reveals that although
only 41% of the 3' most promoters overlap a CpG island, 74% of 5' most promoters overlap
a CpG island.

Conclusion

Our assessment of six PPPs on 1.06 × 109 bps of human genome sequence reveals the specific strengths and weaknesses of individual
PPPs. Our meta-predictor outperforms any individual PPP in sensitivity and specificity.
Furthermore, we discovered that the 5' alternative promoters are more likely to be
associated with a CpG island.